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Antonin Artaud’s prophetic text The Theatre and the Plague, originally presented as a performance-lecture on April 6, 1933 at the Sorbonne, is now an essential element in his salient book The Theater and its Double. In it, Artaud develops the foundations of his Theater of Cruelty by establishing an analogy between the rupture of the civilizational order caused by the “plague” and the “convulsive passions” triggered by the virulence of his transgressive theatrical poetics.

Again reading Artaud’s text The Theater and the Plague, now within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, inspired Joseph Nechvatal in the creation of his eight movement audio suite pour finir avec le jugement de dieu viral symphOny plague (2021). To create it, Nechvatal remixes aspects of his noise music piece viral symphOny (2008) with compressed and transformed and superimposed segments of Artaud’s radio play Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu, that was recorded in several sessions in the French Radiodiffusion studios during the month of November 1947. The radio play was scheduled to be broadcast on February the 2nd, 1948 as part of the series La Voix des Poètes but was immediately banned from air.

Nechvatal’s pour finir avec le jugement de dieu viral symphOny plague can be considered a brother suite to the Orlando et la tempête viral symphOny redux suite that was created by Nechvatal and Andrew Deutsch in 2020, in that it too revisits virus-modelled artificial life audio material extracted from the viral symphOny project and integrates with it an anonymous reading of the novel Orlando, written by Virginia Woolf in 1928.

pour finir avec le jugement de dieu viral symphOny plague is dedicated to Marc Dachy.

Shows often vary by time, with short performances, and endurance efforts. Many styles, and sorts of shows, from talk to music, but mostly experimental sound. Live events occasionally are also broadcast. Radio art is often featured.